So, Republicans have proposed cutting the budget for public broadcasting to zero. This is a perennial issue, as I have discussed before.

For my two cents, here goes: the amount of taxpayer funds as a fraction of the total of all PBS and NPR budgets is very small. Public broadcasting would be better off without it. They should send the check back to the Treasury today, and then they can tell Republicans how they really feel about them. That would take a club out of the hands of Republicans (who never liked public broadcasting from its inception late in the Johnson administration), and it would unite public broadcasting with the real source of its strength — the audience.